Brace for Turbulence: EU Member States’ Climate Strategies in the Aviation Sector, 2018-2020

Schmidt, Nicole and Tobin, Paul and Moore, Brendan (2025). Brace for Turbulence: EU Member States’ Climate Strategies in the Aviation Sector, 2018-2020. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-858062

The science behind climate change has been established, and now the mitigation of climate change has become a political puzzle. We need to act quickly to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, and so this project is designed to find and then share effective policy solutions that can be used across society.

Until very recently, attempted solutions for climate change were 'top down': for example, the United Nations organised annual conferences, and those countries responsible for producing the most greenhouse gases dominated these negotiations. However, this approach for dealing with climate change has failed to generate effective change quickly enough, and academics are looking for new governance solutions for this most pressing and significant of issues.

Increasingly, scholars argue that we need to be improving policy-making the local level, and empowering a wide range of people take a lead in responding to climate change. In particular, they argue we need 'polycentric governance'. Polycentric governance involves businesses, NGOs and government agencies working independently of each other, while also overlapping and coordinating with one another, as part of complex, multi-level networks. The outcome should be that no individual group or organisation is solely responsible for mitigating climate change, and so every 'node' in the network is encouraged to fulfil its part without fearing being exploited by others.

Data description (abstract)

The data is made available with the associated publication. We analysed the EU National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) in order to examine national commitments on aviation.

The data show how frequently EU Member States refer to aviation in their NECPs, and we code these references thematically. First, by conducting a content analysis on all 54 draft and final NECPs, we count the keywords associated with aviation. Second, we inductively and iteratively developed themes and sub-themes for each sentence in the final NECPs that contained an aviation reference (n = 494).

Data creators:

Creator Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
Schmidt Nicole	Heidelberg University
Tobin Paul	University of Manchester
Moore Brendan	Institute for European Studies

Sponsors:

ESRC

Grant reference:

ES/S014500/1

Topic classification:

Politics
Transport and travel

Keywords:

CLIMATE CHANGE, EUROPEAN UNION, CLIMATE PROTECTION, ENERGY POLICY, NATIONAL POLICY

Project title:

Polycentric pioneers? Explaining variations in governance models and their impacts on local climate change policy

Grant holders:

Paul Tobin

Project dates:

From	To
1 January 2020	29 September 2024

Date published:

10 Nov 2025 15:21

Last modified:

10 Nov 2025 15:21

Coverage and Methodology

Temporal coverage:

From	To
3 September 2018	8 June 2020

Geographical area:

Europe

Country:

United Kingdom, Germany (October 1990-)

Spatial unit:

Administrative > Countries

Data collection method:

In stage 1, we count the keywords associated with aviation in each draft and final NECP. For the 26 NECPs available in English, we searched for 11 keywords. Footnote1 France’s draft NECP was available only in French, so we searched for 10 French-language keywords, which were then categorised with their English-language equivalents.Footnote2 We then averaged the totals in two ways: by the number of countries in each region to obtain a regional outlook; and by the number of references per 100 pages, to account for differences in the documents’ lengths. Finally, we compared states’ averages in two ways: by geographical region, as defined by EuroVocFootnote3, to analyse regional patterns; and by date of EU accession, to explore whether the duration of EU membership influences policy development. While this stage of our analysis is effective for assessing and comparing the engagement of each Member State towards aviation in quantitative terms, it does not account for the nature of this engagement. Hence, we undertook a second, qualitative stage of analysis.

In stage 2, we inductively and iteratively developed themes and sub-themes for each sentence in the final NECPs that contained an aviation reference (n = 494).Footnote4 We analysed the final NECPs alone at this stage because these documents reflect each Member State’s finalised planning document after input from the European Commission. We coded each sentence and recoded previous documents whenever we identified a new theme. To ensure the reliability of this stage, each author coded a set of NECPs, and also reviewed a set that had been coded by another author, meaning that every reference to aviation was examined twice, and recoded if two coders agreed to do so.

Observation unit:

Geographic unit, Other

Kind of data:

Numeric, Text

Type of data:

Historical data, International macrodata, Qualitative and mixed methods data

Resource language:

English

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